orthography
orthography on Spoot baby... spooooooot!: a running collection of 2 stories we have gathered and hand-picked because they are worth your time. Every post here touches on orthography in some way — the news, the analysis, the deep dives, and the occasional surprise find. # Spoot. New stories are added to this page as we find them, so check back if you want to keep up with what is happening around orthography, or subscribe to the RSS feed to get them as soon as they are published. Browse the collection below, or head back to the homepage to see everything Spoot baby... spooooooot! is covering right now.
How American Was Franklin’s English?
Benjamin Franklin, the man who gave us bifocals and a kite-based relationship with lightning, also had a grand plan for the English language. He wanted to reform it. Not just tweak it, but wrestle its chaotic spelling to the ground. It's the kind of obsessively nerdy project that makes you wonder if he ever just sat down with a glass of something and thought about silent letters for fun. We do. German's open-access release on the matter is a gift, a deep dive into Franklin's world of linguistic social climbing. It's the footnote that becomes the main event. For those who love the idea that language is less a cage and more a very squishy, mutable thing, we also have a piece on how learning new tongues doesn't change who you are.
Obstupefacting Excrescences.
Two reviews of the same book, and they might as well be describing two different species of mollusk. Colin Burrow's LRB piece on Arnoud Visser's *On Pedantry* is so gloriously, frabjously its own creature that I couldn't just file it away next to Clare Bucknell's NYRB take. It deserves its own frame. Burrow digs into the razor clam hiding beneath the word's respectable surface, and the result is the kind of footnote that swallows the entire page. We've circled this territory before, tangentially, in our piece on why language doesn't change who we are, but Burrow's pedant is something sharper. He's not correcting your grammar; he's burrowing into your assumptions. It's a performance of scholarship that keeps interrupting itself, and you'll thank it for every interruption. Stay spooty.